My story
How I found my way through
The honest version. Written for the person I once was.
My depression began in Bali, of all places. It started as a strange feeling of unsafety, a sense that something was off and that home was the only place I could feel safe again. So I went home. And there, things went deeper.
One year followed. Medication, therapy, a psychiatrist. The medication helped, I want to say that clearly. It held me up enough to function. But it worked like a patch, not like a repair. It quieted the sadness without ever reaching the place where it lived. And after eight months, no light was in sight.
None of it reached the place the sadness lived. What did was slower and stranger than I expected.
What came back to me, in that darkness, was a memory. Years earlier, when I was young, I had a profound mystical experience with a psychedelic. I had also spent the last six years quietly following the research, the clinical trials, the slow legalisation in some parts of the world. Somewhere in me a small spark had always said: maybe this matters.
While still on my antidepressant, and with my doctor aware of what I was exploring, I began very small and very carefully. What those small, occasional experiences gave me was unmistakable: days of brightness, creativity, aliveness. Enough to get me back behind the decks. Enough to teach breath again. Enough that, together with my doctor, we eventually tapered the medication, slowly and properly. Only when I was stable did I take the full journey. And there I found light, connection to the people I love, even to my father who had passed. Gi was back.
I won’t tell you it was instant, or magic. It wasn’t. But something shifted that months of effort hadn’t touched, and it stayed. Breathwork and the daily work of integration are what walked me through it.
I trained as a facilitator because I know what it’s like to need help and not know where it’s safe to look. This work is my way of being, for someone else, what I once needed: a calm, honest, prepared person who has been there, and who asks only that you come as you are.
If any of this sounds like where you are
I offer preparation and integration support for people walking this path. It is non-clinical, unhurried, and always begins with a free conversation. Sometimes the most caring thing I say in it is: not for you now, or not yet.